NATO puts Serb leader on trial

Vojislav Seselj, head of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS), went on trial Nov. 7 before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague, Netherlands. Seselj is an open Serbian nationalist. He was often a direct opponent and even enemy of pro-socialist forces in Yugoslavia, including the Socialist Party of Serbia when it was led by Slobodan Milosevic, the late president of Yugoslavia.

Nevertheless, the ICTY, created by NATO in the early 1990s to prosecute leading Serb politicians, has accused Seselj of forming a “Joint Criminal Enterprise” (JCE) with Milosevic and other political and military leaders. Allegedly, this JCE’s purpose was to create a “Greater Serbia” through “cleansing” of other ethnic groups.

Seselj is charged with war crimes in the pursuit of these aims. Although the accusations against Seselj refer to a time no later than the autumn of 1993, the indictment was issued 10 years later, in 2003.

Seselj is now accused of “hate speeches,” but this charge was entered only after the indictment against him was revised in 2005. Whatever speeches Seselj may have made during all the time relevant to the indictment—that is, before 1993—he was at that time a meaningless politician of a party not even officially recognized. Only in 1998, facing an imminent attack from NATO, would the SRS and the Socialists form a common government.

Like Milosevic before him, Seselj is representing himself at the trial. He enforced his right to do this with a hunger strike last year.

Milosevic in his trial successfully rejected the charge that Serb forces were responsible for the aggression in the Balkans and uncovered the war-mongering policy of the NATO countries, but he became seriously ill. Observers accuse the Tribunal of refusing him medical assistance because his successful defense had become a real danger to the forces behind the Tribunal. Milosevic died in March 2006, before his trial was finished.

Seselj stated in his opening speech that Germany, the Vatican and the U.S. are at fault for the bloody conflicts, as they aimed to destroy the Yugoslav state. He said the ICTY was illegal and under the control of the NATO countries.

The ICTY was established by the U.N. Security Council. Unlike the post-World War II Nuremberg Court, which is often said to serve as a model for The Hague tribunal, the ICTY has no jurisdiction over aggressive war—the crime characterized by the Nuremberg judges as “the supreme international crime.” It was set up under pressure from Germany and the United States, which were already deeply involved in the bloodshed in Yugoslavia.

The NATO countries committed a war of aggression by intervening in Yugoslavia in 1999, but are out of reach of this NATO creation. The trial of Seselj is intended to justify the 1999 attack on Yugoslavia and the exploitation of the former Yugoslav republics by U.S. and European Union imperialism.